In late 2018, I planned a learning project that I didn’t think would take me long.
I wanted to create a stop-motion animation showing my progress creating something super detailed. I also wanted to combine that animation with music and align it side-by-side with its reference video - the source of inspiration for the thing I would eventually create.
Knowing this would take me some time, I picked something I wouldn’t tire of quickly - something from Star Wars. And by Star Wars, I mean the original movie I saw in theatres. I used the text from the opening crawl to make a QR code, overlaid a grid, and from that I set to work on the QR code as a cross stitch.
I didn’t realize how detailed it was or how hard it would be to keep track of my stitches, but I kept going. Some 15 months later, I finished the stitch work. The animation component - the real driver for this effort - turned out to be far easier than I expected. Within a day of finishing I had a completed video, which you can see and hear to the right.
The opening sequence to Star Wars, text, and music are all owned by Disney. I created this video for educational purposes - to learn and to explore the process of taking something inherently digital (the opening sequence, title and text) into the physical world, and then to share it back in a digital format. While the animation of the cross stitch would certainly work without the accompanying audio and video components, they give much needed context about the length and complexity of this physical cross stitch project.
I have no desire to receive a cease and desist from Disney for the educational use of their property. Use discretion if you share, please.